


Lost Without You (Be Mine Again)

by flipflop_diva



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Comfort/Angst, Hints of backstory, Maybe - Freeform, More MCU canon than comic canon, Multi, Natasha Needs a Hug, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world came tumbling down, and then everyone was gone. No Bucky. No Natasha. But getting them both back is easier than figuring out how to make them stay. Set immediately after Captain America: The Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Without You (Be Mine Again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Griddlebone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/gifts).



> So I actually meant for this to be a lot angstier, but I hope you like it anyway! I had a lot of fun writing it! Also, apologies for some (maybe) backstory liberties.

It was the longest four months of Steve’s life, longer than the months when he was coming out of the ice and getting back his footing, longer than the months before the first war when was too skinny and too sick and too afraid of everything.

Bucky was lost. Natasha was gone. He missed them both, in different ways.

He missed the Bucky of his childhood, the friend of his youth. His gut twisted with guilt every time he thought about the fight on the helicarrier and the moment on the expressway. He knew Bucky had saved his life, had pulled him out of the Potomac, and now he knew he owed it to him to get him back, to help him, to _fix_ him.

He owed Natasha something, too, but he wasn’t sure what. She helped him when she didn’t have to. She let him in when she didn’t want to. She kissed him and gave herself to him — at least as much as she ever did — the night before the Triskillian fell. Then she handed him a file and walked away.

Maybe he owed her time, and space. Maybe he owed her a chance to disappear. He thought he probably did, so on those rare moments when he thought about calling her, making sure she was okay, he slipped his phone back in his pocket and thought about Bucky instead.

Until four months, twelve days and two hours after the Triskillian fell, when Sam showed up at his new apartment’s door with a grin on his face. He had found Bucky, he said, or Bucky had found him, he wasn’t sure which, but here he was.

Sam stepped aside, and it really was him. It was Bucky. There. In his apartment. A little scared, a lot cautious, more than a lot broken, but he was _there_.

Sam went home and Steve took Bucky in, and hours turned into days, which turned into weeks, and things were getting better, but something was still missing. Something was always still missing.

•••

Bucky found her photo, once, two weeks after he moved in. Steve had kept the newspaper article about the congressional hearings. Her hair almost glowed in the photo, her eyes intense, that tiny little smirk on her face. It reminded him of when he’d let her go.

Bucky had picked up the article, turned to Steve. “Her,” he said. “I know her? She was … you know her?”

“She’s my friend,” Steve had answered. “Was. Is. I don’t know. Yeah, she was with me. That day.”

He had taken the article from Bucky’s hands and slipped it into a drawer. Bucky didn’t ask again.

•••

They were asleep the night it happened, two months and twenty-six days after Bucky reappeared in his life. They had taken to sharing a bed in Steve’s room. Bucky slept better that way. To be honest, so did Steve.

The noise came from the kitchen, loud and clanking, like something had fallen. Steve grabbed his shield, gestured for Bucky to stay quiet, to stay behind him. He crept down the hall, senses on full alert.

He leaped into the kitchen, shield out, ready to attack. He barely had half a second to process the dirt on her face and in her hair and the sea of red covering the entire left side of her black tank top before she collapsed ungracefully into a heap on the floor.

The wounds were made from a knife, long and deep and almost too many to count. He picked up his phone and dialed the familiar number with shaking fingers. “How good are you at stitches?”

Five minutes later, as Sam leaned over Natasha’s prone form, his wings discarded on the living room floor behind him, he muttered to Steve, “You know this is why they have these things called hospitals.”

Steve shrugged as he pressed the towel harder against the flow of blood in her abdomen. “She came here, to us. I figure if she thought it was safe to go to the hospital, she would.”

Sam mock glared at him as he directed Bucky to hold her head in case she woke up while they were working. “Yeah,” Sam muttered, “because the trained assassin who doesn’t seem to care who lives or dies is really the one we should trust to make the wisest health-care decisions.”

Twelve hours later, long after Sam had left and Natasha still hadn’t woken up, Steve was beginning to regret his decision. They’d moved her into the bedroom and covered her with blankets, but her fingers under the covers were still like ice and she looked as pale as the white sheets around her. Thoughts of internal bleeding and brain damage were fluttering through his mind. He was thirty seconds away from saying, “Screw it!” and calling 9-1-1 when her eyelids fluttered and a very soft groan escaped her lips.

He was leaning over her in an instant, stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers while his other hand rested gently on her shoulder in case she tried to move. “It’s okay, Nat,” he whispered to her. “You’re with us. You’re safe. We got you.”

She groaned again and tilted her head, almost like she was trying to nestle closer to Steve’s hand, but her eyes stopped fluttering and a few seconds later she was out.

The second time she woke up, Steve was in the kitchen trying to make a pot of tea for him and Bucky. Neither of them had slept since Natasha had tumbled back into their lives, and Steve suspected they weren’t going to anytime soon.

He heard the soft whimper as he checked through the various tea bags he had, but by the time he got there, Bucky was leaning over her, much the same way Steve had been the first time she woke up, Bucky’s flesh fingers against her cheek, his metal hand on her shoulder.

Natasha was staring at him with a look that Steve couldn’t tell if it were shock or fear or maybe even relief, but as Steve watched, Bucky leaned over and murmured something in her ear in what sounded like Russian, and Natasha nodded and closed her eyes. A few seconds later, her whimpers stopped.

“Buck?” Steve said and his old friend turned to him, something almost akin to pride on his face.

“She sleeps now,” he told Steve, and Steve nodded, because he wasn’t sure what else there was to say.

That night, Bucky looked from Natasha’s sleeping form to Steve, his face thoughtful. “She reminds me of someone. Who I used to know.”

Steve didn’t say anything, but it made him wonder.

The third time Natasha woke up, Steve and Bucky were out in the living room, curled up together on the couch, heads against each other, hands entwined. Steve woke up to the tingling sensation that someone was watching him.

He was right. She was standing in front of him, in a shirt and pajama bottoms that belonged to Steve and that were way too big for her, and she was grinning.

“Hi,” she said.

“Glad to see you standing,” he answered.

She smirked. “Sorry about that.”

“You going to tell me what happened?”

“Nope. All taken care of anyway.”

“Don’t you think you owe me? You did, after all, show up in the middle of the night and almost bleed out on my kitchen floor while looking like someone mistook you for sushi.”

She gave a half-shrug. “It happens. But I can go if you want.”

“How about you stay?”

She gestured to him and Bucky. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“You’re fine.”

She settled on the couch against his free side, reaching over him to snag the remote. As she flipped channels, Steve leaned over and kissed her temple. “I’ve missed you, Nat.”

She didn’t answer, but he swore she moved a little closer.

•••

With Nat awake, they fell into a bit of an awkward, yet almost easy, way of life, most of it spent sitting on Steve’s couch, Natasha draped on one side of him and Bucky on his other. Natasha never asked Steve about Bucky and Bucky never asked about her, but Steve did catch them eyeing each other quite a few times. Steve also spent a lot of time trying to make sure Natasha didn’t disappear on them. He wouldn’t put it past her, but if she did try, she did it so very, very discreetly he never knew.

Four days after she woke up the third time, she asked Steve if she could ask Sam for a favor. When Steve told her she should do what she needed to do, she gave Sam the address of a place she told him she would kill him if he ever revealed to anyone, and then that night, at well after midnight, she wrapped her arms around Sam, and he flew her away.

She told Steve she needed clothes and other things that were hers — which made sense since she had arrived with nothing but the ruined outfit she had been wearing and all three men were a lot bigger than she was — but he couldn’t help but worry that she was really planning to ditch Sam and disappear into the night.

But when Sam showed back up a couple hours later, Natasha was behind him, two duffle bags slung over her shoulders, and a grin on her face.

The next night, when Bucky was in the shower, she told Steve she would take the couch — Steve and Bucky had been letting her have the bed in the bedroom since she was the one with the still-gaping wounds in her abdomen — so he and Bucky could have time together. She smirked when she said the last part, and Steve rolled his eyes.

“You know you should thank me, right?” she said. She was sitting next to him, her legs slung over his lap.

“And why is that?”

“Because I obviously set you two up.”

“Funny,” Steve said, “That’s not who I remember you trying to set me up with.”

“I gave you his file, didn’t I?”

“Hmmpff.” He snorted, then, “That you did.”

Natasha smiled. She looked quite pleased with herself. A few seconds later, she glanced at him again. “You never did call the nurse, did you?”

Steve couldn’t help the laugh that escaped. “I did not.”

“Because you already knew you wanted Bucky? You could have just told me.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not because of that. Not really anyway. What Bucky and I had was a long time ago. I never expected … And I do like women. I do.”

“So you just didn’t want to call her then?”

He decided to be honest. “There was only one woman I was interested in.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. He saw her trying to figure out whom he was talking about. He didn’t give her a chance. He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers — hard — and then he pulled back.

It was the only time in the three years that he had known her that Steve Rogers caught Natasha Romanoff completely off-guard.

•••

Bucky had had nightmares since he returned to Steve, usually about deprogramming and electric shocks and the other horrible things that had been done to him. Steve had nightmares a lot, too, usually consisting of ice closing in or his friends dying (Bucky and Natasha specifically). But Natasha’s nightmares, when she had them, were the worst. 

Eight days after she woke up for the third time — three nights after she let Steve and Bucky have the bedroom and Steve kissed her — she woke up with a scream so harrowing Steve almost thought someone was trying to murder her. Except he had seen Natasha come close to death and she had never actually uttered a sound. But by the time he and Bucky had leaped off the couch and swung open the bedroom door, she was already out of bed, crouched in a defensive position in the corner, two knives Steve had no idea where they possibly could have come from clenched in her hands. She was panting, as though she were on the verge of hyperventilating, and her eyes were panicked.

“Natasha,” Steve said softly as he came closer to her. Her hands holding the knives were trembling, and that, more than anything, made his chest ache — in pain or fear, he wasn’t sure which. 

“Natasha,” he said again, “it’s okay. It’s us. It’s okay.” He dropped down in front of her, close but not too close, careful not to reach for her. “Can you breathe for me?”

It took awhile, to get her to listen, to calm down, to copy his breathing, but once he was sure she was back in control, he reached out and carefully pulled the knives from her hands. Her eyes focused on Bucky, standing behind Steve, like she only just realized he was there.

“I know you,” she whispered, and there was something in her voice Steve couldn’t quite place, but he didn’t have time to figure it out because before he could she was throwing herself against him, her arms wrapping so tight around his neck he thought she might accidentally choke him.

He picked her up and carried her out to the living room, because he wasn’t sure what else to do and she wasn’t offering suggestions, and sat on the couch with her in his arms. She fell asleep with her head against his chest. Once she was out, Bucky sank down next to Steve, but not close enough to touch him. Steve suspected it was because Natasha’s legs were between them and Bucky didn’t want to touch _her_.

Bucky watched him in silence for the longest time. “You … love … her?” he finally asked. 

Steve looked up, met his eyes, then looked down at the top of Natasha’s head. Her fingers were tangled in his shirt. He glanced back at Bucky. “Yes,” he answered truthfully. “I think so.”

“You love me?”

Steve reached out, took Bucky’s hand, stroked his thumb over Bucky’s palm. “More than you know.”

Bucky nodded, like he was thinking, then he spoke again. “It’s okay,” he said, “to love us both.”

“It is?” Steve blinked. He hadn’t actually thought about that.

“You deserve to be happy,” Bucky said slowly.

“So do you,” Steve answered automatically. They both looked down at Nat. “Her, too,” Steve said, because they were both thinking it. He turned back to his best friend, the one person he had loved his whole life. “I need you to tell me something, though.”

Bucky frowned. Steve squeezed his hand.

“Not bad,” he said. “Just …. in the room, what she said to you … you told me you thought you knew her. Did you know her? Before?”

A haunted shadow crossed Bucky’s face. “I did bad things once,” he said softly, and his voice echoed with sadness. Something twisted in Steve’s gut.

“Tell me,” he whispered, because there was no turning back now.

“Hurt people,” Bucky said. “Kill people.” He paused, for so long Steve didn’t think he was going to keep going. “Train little girls to be assassins.”

Steve’s eyes closed, against his will. “Natasha?” he whispered as he opened them. Bucky was looking at her now, staring at her hair and her mouth, partially opened as she breathed against Steve’s chest.

“I remember one,” he said. “She was the littlest one. Red hair. Green eyes. But she was fast, smart. No one could catch her. They said she was going to be the best.” Bucky tore his eyes away from Natasha, looked up at Steve. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” He didn’t know what else to say. His world spun. His best friend — the man he loved — had trained the woman he loved to be an assassin. She was who she was partly because of Bucky. They had known each other before he knew her and when he thought Bucky was dead. It didn’t make sense, but at the same time it explained everything.

Natasha had never told him anything about her past, and he had never asked. He wondered if she had known before tonight. He wondered if that was what she had dreamed about that had scared her. He wondered if it even mattered.

•••

He didn’t talk to Natasha until two days later, after Sam offered to take Bucky out to an ice cream place he said had the best sundaes in the city. After his talk with Bucky that night, he had put Natasha back in bed. If she remembered anything in the morning, she pretended she didn’t.

But now it was just the two of them, curled together on the couch.

“I need to ask you something,” he said. “Two things actually.”

“Shoot, Rogers.”

“Bucky said he knows you. Knew you. When you were younger.”

He felt her freeze, her body tensing beside him. “I didn’t lie to you.” She sounded almost scared.

“I didn’t say you did. I’m just asking if you remember.”

She didn’t move. He almost wondered if she was breathing. Finally, she whispered, “I don’t know. It’s … flashes. I don’t know if it’s real. I can’t … I don’t know.”

“Did he hurt you? That you remember?”

“No.” This answer came fast. “He was … nice … to me. He was kind. He …” She paused. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay.” He reached out and took her hand, squeezed it. 

“You said there was something else?”

“There is.”

“Okay.”

“I want to know what you want. Here. With me.”

Natasha frowned.

“I told you before what I wanted,” Steve said.

“You’re with Bucky.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and he had a feeling it was the most honest thing she had said to him in days. He let go of her hand, placed his on her cheek instead and leaned in and kissed her.

“You can tell me to stop if you want to,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. 

She didn’t tell him to stop.

•••

It went on like that for awhile. Steve tried not to think about how it maybe couldn’t last forever. He didn’t want to think about that; he wanted them both.

Bucky was comfort and safety and nostalgia. Rough kisses and rougher hands and the world falling away until it was just the two of them and no one else mattered. Natasha was excitement and danger and a new chance. She was soft lips and softer hands and her hair tickling his chest as she fell asleep next to him.

The moments he spent with them were perfect. The moments he spent without them were filled with anxiety that someone was going to leave or he was going to have to choose.

Until he stumbled into the kitchen one morning, searching for coffee, to find Natasha perched on the counter and Bucky between her legs (both completely fully dressed), both his hands stroking her cheeks and her eyebrows and her hair as he kissed her.

They started when he gasped, pulling back to look at him, both of their faces masked with concern and apologies. 

“We wanted to try,” Bucky said. “For you.”

“We want this to work,” Natasha said, and he could tell by the softness in her voice that she meant it.

They slept together that night, the three of them, Natasha draped on top of Steve’s chest, Bucky to his side, his arms wrapped around them both.

“I could leave,” Natasha said out of nowhere. Steve had thought she was sleeping. “You two could be happy.”

“You could stay,” Steve said, “And we could be happy together.”

“I don’t know how to be happy,” she said. Steve tightened his arm around her and he felt Bucky do the same.

“Maybe we can figure it out together,” Steve said.

“Together,” Bucky said.

“Okay,” Natasha said. And she didn’t bring it up again.


End file.
